2010 Recruiting Trends

After much anticipation, we released the Roundtable’s 2010 Recruiting Forecast this week. Drawing on responses from Recruiting executives at nearly 90 organizations across the globe, this report provides an overview of 2010 budgets, hiring levels, and sourcing trends. To whet your appetite, a few very high-level trends:

• Recruiting staff salaries seem to be stabilizing
• The use of Web 2.0 recruiting technologies is widely projected to increase
• Career Web site investment and sourcing use are projected to increase

Roundtable members, finalize your 2010 plans by learning how your peers are forecasting for the upcoming year in the 28-page, full version of the 2010 Recruiting Forecast.

Highlights from Michigan State University 2009-2010 Recruiting Trends Report

College hiring this year, compared to last, is down and is expected to fall next year, but there are some pockets of growth in the hiring of graduates. Michigan State University just released highlights from their Recruiting Trends Report for 2009-2010 which focuses on trends in college hiring. A few highlights from the report on college hiring trends:

• Hiring of college students in 2009 was down 35-40% from 2008 levels
• Hiring of college students for 2010 is predicted to be down 2% from 2009 levels
• Large (over 4,000 employees) and midsized (500 to 4,000 employees) companies expect to decrease college hiring in 2010 by 3% and 11% respectively, while small size companies (less than 500 employees) expect in increase college hiring by 15%
• Sectors that are expecting to experience growth in college hiring include e-commerce and entrepreneurship, agriculture production and food processing, environmental sciences, information systems, manufacturing, nonprofits, statistics, nursing, social work, multimedia and Web design
• Sectors that are expecting to see a decrease in college hiring include accounting, banking, engineering, transportation, utilities, real estate and computer science and computer programming.
• Overall organizations are focusing on hiring candidates with flexibility and adaptability skills

The results of this report are based on a survey of over 2,500 companies and institutes and will be presented at the annual Trends in Recruiting Conference in Chicago on November 20th.

Some ROI Numbers for Campus Recruiting

Campus/graduate recruiting is easy to support in a good economy but can be difficult to support in a bad one. A look at the headlines about the rising joblessness of recent graduates (such as this one from Business Week) shows that large-scale campus hiring isn’t on the priority list of many organizations today.

When times are tough, investments without a hard ROI calculation behind them are the first to go. Campus recruiting is usually in that category.

Until now. Lancaster University just released a study concluding that campus hires pay for themselves after just 20 months on the job, and over three years can bring 500% ROI. The study was based on determining the cost per campus hire and calculating how much these hires earn for the business. It looks like there’s new material out there for our business cases to keep campus recruiting on the priority list.

(Roundtable members, access other data and templates to help you build your case for campus recruiting.)

Recruiting Temporary Hires

Despite recent green shoots in the economy, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how strong the recovery will be. Many of us in recruiting are proceeding with caution, but we also face the need to provide labor to meet increased demand for goods and services. Some organizations have turned to temporary hires to address the up-tick in demand. In the US, despite the increase in unemployment rate to 10.2% in October, the economy added 34,000 temporary jobs last month.

There are many benefits to hiring workers on a temporary basis (and keeping in mind the possibility of converting some of those workers to permanent workers in the future). Temporary workers:

• Provide an opportunity to evaluate performance and fit to see if they should be retained as a permanent employee
• Don’t usually need to be given costly health or retirement benefits
• Protect the organization from further layoffs by creating a more flexible labor force

In this labor market, many job seekers who would not have considered a temporary job before are now more open to the discussion of temporary work. This change in outlook provides us, as recruiters, with more options in hiring workers on a temporary basis.

Have You Reorganized Lately?

A fair number of the conversations I’ve had recently with recruiting executives starts with a reference to the recent restructuring or reorganization of their recruiting team (also reflected in a recent Roundtable member poll—for members only). This is not a surprise given the current economic conditions. Whether it was centralization, decentralization, staff reductions, or departures, most of us are in the same boat of “doing more with less.”

With a new team, it’s tempting to get started on all of the initiatives that we never had time to do when recruiters were chained to old structures and overwhelming hiring volume—building talent pipelines, updating the employment brand, and choosing assessment vendors. But if reorganization has taken place, chances are there are new roles, new processes, and/or disengaged recruiters to deal with first.

Even if it’s already been done, do a second check of the “basics”:

• Clarify roles and responsibilities within the newly structured teams, and be aware of any gaps that restructuring may have left behind


• Improve (or redefine) process efficiency, taking into account handoffs to different stakeholders who may have been added or removed from the original process


• Make sure members of your team are engaged, have compelling career paths, and are measured by accurate performance criteria

If the optimists are correct (and we’re on the eve of hiring volume increase), your recruiting team’s success will depend on getting these basics right.

Candidates Who Will Say Anything to Get a Job

The job market is tough out there for candidates; with high unemployment rates and only a handful of firms hiring, some candidates are desperate enough to stretch the truth. In fact, in a 2008 Roundtable survey of new hires almost one in four admitted they were less than accurate during the selection process (and that was when unemployment was still in the 6% range). While Roundtable research shows the majority of job seekers are willing to wait for the right job offer, there is a small subset that are willing to do whatever it takes to get a job.

Jeffrey Chiang is one of those in that small subset. While interviewing with one financial services firm, he fabricated a story about receiving an offer from another firm, and even went as far as forging an offer letter (with a glaring typo, no less). It wasn’t long before well-connected financial services recruiters started comparing notes, and it’s pretty obvious that he won’t be working for Wall Street anytime soon.

The recent case of Jeffrey Chiang is a great example of the type of candidates that we need to be wary of. There are a few things that we can do as recruiters to increase the rigor of our selection processes.

1. Make candidates demonstrate what they can do. Move beyond just asking candidates to describe their skills and ask them to demonstrate their skills in a live setting.
2. Use a detailed skills questionnaire to gather information on candidate’s experiences performing critical skills and tasks.
3. Leverage the insights of the candidate’s contacts for more usable and accurate reference check information during the reference check process.